Dell has a launched a new line of laptop computers dubbed Dell Studio that has raised a few eyebrows. The laptops ship with Windows Vista which isn’t surprising, but the thing that made Gizmodo do a double-take was the Mac-like dock that appeared on the desktop. The dock is used as a way to remove some of the icons from the user’s desktop, and can be customized in a variety of ways (color, location, etc…). Plus you can add your own shortcuts to it.

After a little searching around I came across this article from Notebook Review that was just posted today. That’s where I got the screenshot from at the beginning of the article, and as you can see each main icon serves as a folder for your shortcuts. That way you can group your related shortcuts, and therefore steer clear of cluttering up the dock itself.

The Dell Studio line also includes backlit keyboards, which happens to be one of the biggest features that drew me to the MacBook Pro. That way when you’re in a low-light environment, such as a presentation, you’ll still be able to see the keys on your keyboard. I had been wondering for awhile why Apple was one of the only laptop manufacturers to offer this feature, and so I applaud Dell for offering this.

I’m sure there will be a lot of Mac fanatics criticizing Dell for including these features will their Studio laptops, but the dock they designed actually looks pretty good. The dock isn’t very Apple-like if you ask me, but there will be plenty of other people who will disagree. I wonder if they will be rolling these two things out to their other laptops?